In 1970, Jeremy Cooper, then 19, decided to spend part of his gap year studying French at Paris University. He loved all things French and spoke the language fluently. Shortly after his arrival, by a serendipitous route, he encountered Maurice Mazo, a distinguished intellectual and painter who was living in a retirement home for artists in Nogent-sur-Marne, to the SW of Paris. Despite their age difference – Mazo was 70 years old – the two developed an extraordinary and remarkably close friendship.
The correspondence between the two men contained in this slender volume follows the relationship from its inception to its end, upon Mazo's death in 1989, by which time Jeremy Cooper was a married family man in his late 30s with a flourishing legal career. At its centre lies an exploration of the creative process and the intermingled perspectives of youth and age on common themes – painting, literature, love, religion, and family values.
It is fascinating to follow the exchanges in which the wisdom of an artist's long life experiences mingles so engagingly with the energy, the confidence but also the curiosity of a young man. At a time when friendships across generations are so rare and appear increasingly fractured and splintered, it is heartwarming to read this life-affirming correspondence and to discover all the reassuring values and confidences it reveals.
